Recently, Time Out covered the emergence of commercial ‘super-galleries’, capable of mounting museum-style exhibitions. Well, this retrospective of Francesca Woodman arguably goes one better, in that it actually is a museum show, having previously toured various European institutions. As such, it reflects the extraordinary growth in the American photographer’s reputation, both commercially and critically, in the past quarter-century since she died, as a relative unknown, at just 22 years old.
Certainly, Woodman’s images nowadays are among the most recognisable in photography, with their small, square format, typically in moody monochrome – though there are a couple of late colour experiments here too – and their stage-like, interior backdrops – though, again, there’s one remarkable series set amid the rugged, romantic outdoors. What characterises her oeuvre above all esle, however, is the relentless focus on her own body as subject matter; or rather, to put it more philosophically, on the relationship between her body as both subject and object, observer and observed. The idea is right there in her earliest self-portrait, as a precocious, lank-haired 13 year old, the shutter-release cable stretching umbilically between her and the camera itself. This notion is expanded in her later use of various props, where she poses with mirrors, sheets of glass, or museum display cabinets.
The best way of thinking about Woodman’s images, then, is as philosophical enactments about the nature and representation of bodies – bodies in general, women’s in particular, hers – often naked. Not that her work ever seems dry or academic, rather, it comes across as theatrically charged, darkly witty, still pertinent. Sometimes, her vision of the body as object, as corporeal matter, is so abject and self-alienating, it’s disconcerting: her arms morbidly entangled in fly-paper, for example, or her legs tightly strapped with tape, flesh bulging like the Michelin Man’s.
Other works veer to the opposite extreme: the body as mere image, hidden and camouflaged among wallpaper, or, in her famous long-exposure shots, reduced to an ephemeral blur, so that it’s tempting to read them as a prelude to her final act of self-erasure, her own suicide. Yet to do so would only diminish their reach and inventiveness. Ultimately, seeing so many works together like this – the majority of extant pieces, though it might have been better to display them chronologically – makes you realise what an astonishingly original artist she really was.